


Blame the Greenwood Tree

by enviropony



Category: Castlevania (Cartoon)
Genre: Depression, Magical Artifacts, Multi, Pre-OT3, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-11
Updated: 2019-12-11
Packaged: 2021-02-25 23:27:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,186
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21753724
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/enviropony/pseuds/enviropony
Summary: Alucard wants to crawl into a hole and die. He manages the first part, by virtue of going down into the Belmont library. Where he touches a Thing.
Relationships: Alucard/Trevor Belmont/Sypha Belnades
Comments: 10
Kudos: 181
Collections: Writing Rainbow Green





	Blame the Greenwood Tree

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fencesit](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fencesit/gifts).



Alucard mopes around the castle for weeks after Sypha and Belmont take off. He has himself a good cry over Father, and Mother, and wallows in the misery of being left behind by people he cares about.

It’s true that he’d told them he meant to entomb himself – to die – after they were gone, but even as he’d said it, it had struck him wrong. As overwhelming as the pain had felt, he hadn’t quite been ready to end his existence; he had people he cared about, after everything, and he wanted to see them happy.

But they’d left him. He hadn’t been brave enough to ask them to stay, so they’d left him, hopped cheerily into their wagon and waved goodbye.

Now he’s alone, and it drags at him, turns every step into a struggle, makes it near impossible to get out of bed.

Alucard calls it moping, telling himself he’s being ridiculous. There’s work to be done – corpses to remove from the hallways, rooms to be cleared, repairs to be made. There’s a hole in the ground beneath the castle, full of books, that may or may not suddenly collapse in on itself.

He should do something about that.

He calls it a success if he gets vertical on any given day, makes it down to the kitchens to drink from the last of the bloodwine – it’s going off, he’ll have to start hunting soon. There’s real food in the cellars, and he can do well enough on it, but Father had taught him that the worst wounds could only be healed by blood, and his heart is one gory mess of a wound.

He calls it moping, and wallowing, but self-reproach turns into self-loathing, and it’s all downhill from there. 

He contemplates the tomb once more, but the safest place for one such as him – Dracula’s blood, even though it’s diluted, has the potential to call up all manner of horrors – is underground, and, again, giant hole under the castle… how do you entomb yourself in the ground when all the substratum’s gone?

How the hell is this castle still upright if all the substratum’s gone? 

A perverse, morbid curiosity finally propels Alucard out of bed and down into the Belmont hold. He hasn’t bathed in over a week, or even combed his hair, but there’s nobody around to see it, and maybe the damn castle will fall in on him while he’s down there, problem solved.

He turns into a bat and flies down, because there is not enough rope in the castle to make a suitable ladder, and why the fuck should he bother anyway, being the only one here?

The flight clears his head rather more than he was expecting. Bats are simple creatures, for all that his magic helps him retain his mind. Whatever chemical fuckery has been happening in his brain over the past weeks seems to have reset, and his grief is sharper of a sudden, but sharp knives don’t hurt as much.

Alucard takes a breath, gags on the smell of himself, and has a long look around the place. The walls of the ante-chamber seem fairly intact, no cracks or displacement that he can see. He turns into a bat again, flies a sloping spiral from the top of the chamber to the bottom to be sure, but it all appears to be in remarkably good shape for having had a castle come down within a hundred yards of it. 

The castle actually sits atop the library chamber. As Alucard examines it, alternating between bat form and simply popping from place to place, he decides that it’s probably going to hold up fine. The castle is considerably bigger than the chamber, which is largely dug into bedrock, and the bulk of its weight is, as far as he can tell, distributed evenly atop the cavernous space. Barring earthquakes, there shouldn’t be a problem.

Now that he’s down here, death wish and structural concerns abated, Alucard’s innate curiosity takes over. For every book he’d taken a moment to peruse on that initial foray, a hundred more line the walls, untouched. For every artefact he’d sneered at, there are a dozen more, mostly still intact. Alucard wanders along the shelves, plucking books randomly, putting them back haphazardly, or not at all. In a little nook near the western wall, he finds a section on soul magic, and a bronze statue of a trio of trees all connected to each other through their roots. He thinks they might be aspen. 

The statue is very finely made, the leaves of each tree standing out in exquisite detail. It must have taken years to complete. Alucard can’t help but reach out and touch. The bronze is cool to the touch; the leaves seem to quake as his fingers brush them.

A loud, alarmed snort startles him, and Alucard moves swiftly to the center of the library, from which a litany of curses is now rising. He stands at the edge of the shelves and stares.

“What the fuck are you looking at?” Trevor Belmont snarls as he hops down from his wagon and goes to calm the snorting, wild-eyed horses that are attached to it. Sypha hops down, too, eyeing the library cautiously.

“What… ah, what happened?” She stumbles her way toward Alucard, her eyes still mostly on the scene around her rather than the debris-strewn floor.

“I have no idea,” Alucard says, gaze darting between her, Belmont and the wagon. “Ah… It’s good to see you, I suppose?”

“You suppose?” Sypha asks, and trips right into his arms. He hugs her to him, and she hugs right back, but he can see her nose wrinkling. “You smell as bad as Trevor.”

“Yes, well,” Alucard starts, and doesn’t finish. Not that he would have bathed, even if he’d been expecting company, with the state he’d been in. It’s still there, he thinks, waiting for him. The grief will devolve into despair again in heartbeats, if he lets it.

“We were talking about stopping for the night,” Sypha says, pulling back but not letting go. She turns in Alucard’s arms, regarding the wagon and Belmont’s one-sided conversation with the horses. “Between one step and the next, we were here.” She looks up at him, suspicious. “Did you touch something?”

Alucard blinks. He had, hadn’t he? “There was a tree statue,” he says. “I have no idea why it would have caused this.”

“Trevor!” Sypha calls. “Come here. Leave them, they’re not going anywhere.”

Belmont scowls. “The last time you said that, they ended up in the middle of a stream, with the wagon still attached!”

“They are troublemakers,” Sypha concedes quietly. Louder, she insists, “There is literally nowhere for them to go.”

“Fine!” Belmont gives each horse a final pat on the neck, and makes his way toward Alucard and Sypha. “I get the feeling this is your fault,” he says by way of greeting.

Alucard shrugs. “It might be. This way.”

He leads them back to the nook, and points at the statue. “There it is.”

Sypha leans close to examine it. Belmont scans the books around them. Alucard stands where he is, and tries not to fidget.

“Soul magic,” Belmont says at length. “What the hell kind of soul magic moves a whole wagon?”

“We’ll have to find out,” Sypha says with a decisive nod, and opens the book that’s nearest to hand. Alucard follows her example, and Belmont, with a begrudging sigh, pulls a random book off the shelf in front of him.

“How’ve you been, Alucard?” he asks. Alucard can’t tell if he’s being polite, or casual, or casually polite, or if he’s building up to some kind of insult.

“Eh,” Alucard hedges, “about how you’d expect, I suppose.”

“I have no idea what I’d expect, given the circumstances,” Belmont says, leafing rapidly through the pages. Alucard cringes, resisting the urge to pull the book out of his hands. “You look like hell, by the way. When’s the last time you put on a clean shirt?”

“That’s rich, coming from you,” Alucard snipes back, intensely aware that he’s been wearing this shirt for going on ten days.

“I only have the one,” Belmont points out. “You have a castle full.”

Alucard glares over the top of his book, and Belmont glares back. Sypha mutters, “Boys,” rather vaguely as she turns pages in the book she’s holding.

It takes a few hours, hours in which Belmont is alternately friendly and abrasive, but Sypha finally finds something. “It’s called The Bond of the Aspens,” she says, pointing to a picture of the selfsame statue. “Sometimes aspens are bound together by their roots. They look like different trees aboveground, but if you dig down, you see they’re all growing from the same root system.”

“And how does that move wagons?” Belmont asks, leaning into her. Alucard wonders, with a pang of sad jealousy, what they’ve been up to all these weeks, while he’s been miserably alone in his father’s wretched castle.

Sypha hums. “It’s a… it… consummates soul bonds? That doesn’t make any sense. I don’t know this language very well.” She hands the book to Alucard. “Can you read this?”

Alucard examines the text. “'Consummate' is not quite correct. A more accurate translation is that it solidifies soul bonds. If a strong emotional bond exists between people – two or three, or even more – the statue creates circumstances under which the bond is…” He blinks, and looks up at Sypha and Belmont’s expectant faces. “Ah, that is…”

“Spit it out,” Belmont snaps.

Alucard absolutely will not, because this cannot be happening.

Sypha takes the book back, and reads again. And again. “So, consummate was the right word,” she says eventually.

“What.” Belmont glances back and forth between them. “What.” It’s not a question so much as a demand.

“The tree statue thinks we belong together,” Sypha says, very calmly. “And it will keep bringing us back here until we fuck.”

“What,” Belmont repeats. “And then we can go?” 

Alucard isn’t sure if he should be amused or insulted that Belmont’s treating this like a simple task to be fulfilled.

“In theory,” Sypha says, eyes on the book again. She turns a page. “But if one of the bond-mates is suffering, the others will be returned to them again. To support the bond-mate and restore the bond.” She closes the book, runs a finger along its spine, and looks up at Alucard. “You haven’t been doing well, have you?” She sets the book aside and moves closer, running her hands up and down Alucard’s arms. “You haven’t been doing well at all. And we left you all alone.”

Alucard opens his mouth to contradict her, or demure, but what comes out is a choked sob. He grits his teeth, shakes his head and tries to pull away, but Sypha follows him until he’s backed up against one of the bookshelves, breath hitching.

“It’s okay,” she says, pressing close, wrapping her arms around his waist. “I’m so sorry. We should have realized.”

Alucard lets himself be held, puts his head back against the shelf and lets the tears fall. He doesn’t care if Belmont sees. 

A weight on his shoulder startles him; the musky scent of unwashed hair and stale smoke invades his nose. When he opens his eyes, Belmont’s forehead is pressed to his shoulder, one arm around Sypha, the other snaking around Alcuard’s waist. “Guess we fucked up,” Belmont murmurs.

“I should have asked,” Alucard says through his tears. “I should have asked you to stay. It’s not your fault.” He puts one arm around Belmont, and the other in Sypha’s wild, blonde hair. “I’m sorry I triggered the stupid tree statue. I should know better than to touch things like that.”

Sypha giggles wetly into his chest; she’s crying, too. “We’ve been talking about you the whole time, you know. ‘I wonder how Alucard’s doing? Do you think he’s cleaned up the halls yet? I bet he’s cataloging the books.’ We didn’t forget you.”

“Not even you, Belmont?” Alucard asks, tapping at Belmont’s side.

“Oh, especially not Trevor,” Sypha says, a smile in her voice.

“Shut up,” Belmont grumbles, but he presses closer to Alucard. “I’m allowed to be worried for a friend.”

“Oh, we’re friends now, are we?” Alucard asks, resting his cheek on top of Belmont’s head.

“Apparently we’re bond-mates,” Belmont snarks back. “And we have to have sex now.”

“Well, not right now,” Sypha says, though she belies her words somewhat by teasing her fingers down Alucard’s back. “There’s time to work up to that. You both need a bath, for one thing.”

Before Alucard can say anything, a crash comes from the main part of the library, followed by an equine squeal. Belmont startles, cursing. “I told you!”

“For another thing,” Sypha says, finally pulling back, “we have to get those horses out of the library before they make a mess.”

“I would venture,” Alucard offers as he follows his new bond-mates out of the nook, “that it’s a little too late for that.”

-end-


End file.
